Round-Em-Up

-- At Gizmodo, an item which talks about the great lengths Amazon is going to in order to keep a lid on its plans for a streaming series set in the world of the Lord of the Rings. They include a locked writers room with a security guard and fingerprint access. Undisclosed: What kind of lengths Amazon will go to in order to prevent this series from sucking as bad as the Hobbit trilogy did are not included.

-- Last year three professors revealed that they had sent faked articles to academic journals, which instead of vetting them and finding out they were fakes, ran with them. The result should have been kind of a wake-up call to academia that it's submerged itself so deeply in jargon, identity politics and monomaniacal worldview that it can't even tell truth from fiction anymore. Instead, the university that employs the only one of the three to hold an untenured academic position has decided to see if he should face disciplinary action. They're not shooting the messenger, but they may indeed decide to fire him.

-- "Dark matter" and "dark energy" are terms that cosmologists, physicists and some other scientists use to describe certain unknown but theorized substances. What gets used in which instance can be confusing, so physicist and writer Sabine Hossenfelder offers a quick explanation here. What's interesting to me is that "dark matter" would better be described as transparent than dark because it doesn't absorb light the way dark things do. It's just completely unaffected by it. Also that "dark energy" is also better thought of as transparent and isn't actually energy either. And that the SyFy Network was stupid for canceling its TV show Dark Matter while keeping the less and less interesting Killjoys on the air. That last one may be my opinion rather than Dr. Hossenfelder's, though.